乘着风，我走的比云更远 ，比山更高。Riding the wind, I go further than clouds, higher than mountains.

Month: April 2016

Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, the Netherlands, in 1959. She studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1986. Through the late 1980s, she photographed people in clubs for magazines in the Netherlands and worked for corporations as a portraitist. In 1990 she injured her hip when her car was struck by a bicycle. A self-portrait produced during her rehabilitation, … Continue reading Portraitist Rineke Dijkstra

in 1993, while browsing in a junk shop, artist oliver croy discovered 387 model buildings, each neatly wrapped in its own garbage bag–the architectural creations of austrian insurance clerk peter fritz. there is little known about the life of fritz, he nevertheless left behind a substantial body of work that stands as an intriguing testament to his imagination and passion. 20 years after the discovery … Continue reading the 387 houses of peter fritz at the venice art biennale

Since dropping her new album Lemonade on Tidal/HBO on Saturday (and other services in the days after), use of the digital fruit on Twitter has gone off the charts. Well, not totally off of them, but still really high. (See: Actual chart above.) In April, there have been more than 2 million tweets including at least one lemon emoji—and 62 percent of them have been … Continue reading Beyoncé’s Lemonade Is Making the Lemon Emoji Very Popular | WIRED

Several Rutgers University researchers devised a new method for “reinforcement learning” (a sub-area of machine learning) using Object-Oriented Markov Decision Processes, which is described as “a representation that looks at a higher level than usual and considers objects and interactions.” If that sounds complicated, their demonstration makes the concept much easier to understand. They showed the OO-MDPs representation by presenting a system that learned to play … Continue reading GameSetWatch Machine Plays Pitfall, Dances

Krippendorff‘s alpha coefficient[1] is a statistical measure of the agreement achieved when coding a set of units of analysis in terms of the values of a variable. Since the 1970s, alpha is used in content analysis where textual units are categorized by trained readers, in counseling and survey research where experts code open-ended interview data into analyzable terms, in psychological testing where alternative tests of the same phenomena need to be compared, … Continue reading Krippendorff’s alpha – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Every week in London, 30,000 people download Uber to their phones and order a car for the first time. The technology company, which is worth $60bn, calls this moment “conversion”. Uber has deployed its ride-hailing platform in 400 cities around the world since its launch in San Francisco on 31 May 2010, which means that it enters a new market every five days and eight hours. … Continue reading How Uber conquered London | Sam Knight | Technology | The Guardian

This is a visualization of the requests Google receives “from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from [Google’s] services or to review such content to determine if it should be removed for inconsistency with a product’s community policies”. Source: Google Removal Requests Continue reading Google Removal Requests

This article considers the issue of opacity as a problem for socially consequential mechanisms of classification and ranking, such as spam filters, credit card fraud detection, search engines, news trends, market segmentation and advertising, insurance or loan qualification, and credit scoring. These mechanisms of classification all frequently rely on computational algorithms, and in many cases on machine learning algorithms to do this work. In this article, I … Continue reading How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms

The Cloud is an Arduino-controlled, motion-triggered lightning & thunder performance, as well as a music-activated visualizing speaker. As an interactive lamp and speaker system designed to mimic a thundercloud in appearance, The Cloud employs embedded motion sensors to create unique lightning and thunder shows while providing entertainment value and inspiring awe. This is a kind of magic, not based on illusions and trickery, but on sensors … Continue reading cloud. + rc.

The film does not tell a story so much as present an essay-like study of Godard’s view of contemporary life; Godard wrote that “I wanted to include everything: sports, politics, even groceries. Everything should be put in a film”.[1] Godard himself narrates the film in a whispered voice-over that discusses his fears to the audience about the contemporary world, including the Vietnam War. The film often … Continue reading Two or Three Things I Know About Her – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A unit or danwei (simplified Chinese: 单位; traditional Chinese: 單位; pinyin: dān wèi) is the name given to a place of employment in the People’s Republic of China. While the term danwei remains in use today it is more properly used to refer to a place of employment during the period when the Chinese economy was still more heavily socialist or when used in the context of one of state-owned enterprises. Source: Work unit – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Continue reading Work unit – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jonas Mekas was the co-founder, in 1954, of the seminal publication Film Culture. He was the first film critic of The Village Voice, and his self-chosen beat was the noncommercial cinema. Mekas founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and then, in 1970, Anthology Film Archives. He’s also a filmmaker. Any of these activities would establish him in the history books as one of the most important modern movie-people. But the activity … Continue reading Jonas Mekas, Champion of the “Poetic” Cinema – The New Yorker

Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided. Today cities have become the world’s dominant demographic and economic clusters. As the sociologist Christopher Chase-Dunn has pointed out, it is not population or territorial size that drives world-city status, but economic weight, proximity to zones of growth, political stability, and attractiveness for foreign capital. In … Continue reading Megacities, not nations, are the world’s dominant, enduring social structures — Quartz

In the age of the digital generation, written public data is ubiquitous and acts as an outlet for today’s society. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn have profoundly changed how we communicate and interact. They have enabled the establishment of and participation in digital communities as well as the representation, documentation and exploration of social behaviours, and had a disruptive effect on how we … Continue reading How do politicians use Facebook? An applied Social Observatory

Martin Parr is a chronicler of our age. In the face of the constantly growing flood of images released by the media, his photographs offer us the opportunity to see the world from his unique perspective. At first glance, his photographs seem exaggerated or even grotesque. The motifs he chooses are strange, the colours are garish and the perspectives are unusual. Parr’s term for the … Continue reading Martin Parr

About me

I am a researcher in the field of computational social science, using online data to question various social issues.

By dumping and parsing Wikipedia datasets in different languages, I apply the methods of data mining and data visualization to explore the collective research project ‘Mapping a World in Wikipedia’ in an interdisciplinary laboratory at the EPFL.

Aside from research work, I am a street photographer and swing dancer.